iPhone games are front and center at WWDC - MacWorld

by Peter Cohen, Macworld.com
Veterans of Apple-focused trade shows may have noticed a significant change of pace at this yearâ€™s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote and the Mach rollout of the iPhone SDK. Gamingâ€”long an area that Apple has, quite frankly, given short shriftâ€”has been featured front and center. Say what you want about the moribund state of Mac gaming, but Apple is clearly on message when it comes to iPhoneâ€™s potential as a gaming device.

Itâ€™s little wonder. Gaming on mobile platforms has been a burgeoning market for a while, and the iPhoneâ€™s accelerometer and touchscreen make it a natural for a new breed of games that is hitting the market in the wake of the success of Nintendoâ€™s Wii console, which uses hand-held controllers that offer gesture-based interaction. Adopting tilt and touchscreen actions is a logical evolutionâ€”in fact, itâ€™s similar in principal to Nintendoâ€™s DS touch screen display, which has been enormously popular for the last several years.

Well, it *appears* like it may an easy market for little guys to get into and charge small fees for little games, which is ideal for shareware-sized developers. Not only that but the platform is limited, which means even AAA game houses can't really put anything more into the device than the indie can -- hiring 50 artists isn't likely going to help them earn more money on the iPhone. I think it possibly lowers the bar for indie developers to compete directly with the big dogs.

For me, it's just fun to write games for a screen size that kind of reminds me of the good ol' days. It's like developing for an eight to ten year old machine with the resolution of a NES (okay, not that small, but you get the picture). But the horsepower is there to make Quake 3 if you wanted. Ask any old-skool game developer and they'll tell you that's fun!

Plus, the iPhone is a rather large market now, only one year after initial release (less than one year at this point, actually), and appears to be growing into the future. Plus, it appears that piracy will not have much, if any, effect, which means developers can charge much less for the same relative profit, and not hassle with security. Plus you won't have to deal with distribution and payment, which I think will attract many weekend coders who can simply build it, set a price, and walk away. Maybe I'm imagining things there though... don't know personally because Apple didn't let me in the beta program.

The downside of such an attractive market to little developers is that it will attract little developers, which may produce crappy products to flood the market space with. We'll see how that pans out. There is also the positive side-effect that once they learn how to program with Cocoa they will be much more inclined to release software for the Mac as well. This thing could go all kinds of different directions and only time will tell which ones will be taken.